Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

PaaS stands for "Platform as a Service;" it's one of several classes of cloud computing services. Compare this to Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service), DBaas (Database as a Service) and CFaaS (cluster...well you get the idea). Here's an update on some PaaS services that have free (as in no money) tiers. I've left off any that are free trial periods. It's annoying to have to keep checking the calendar.  I'm also averse to listing any that require a credit card to get into the door. This list was thrown together quickly, mostly so I didn't have to bookmark all these and remember the details. I went over some of these when I wrote about cloud services in general  last year.  And now, in no particular order.... https://www.openshift.com My current favorite. You can run up to 3 small applications (they call them "gears") for nothing, nada, zip. You can even set up a custom domain. How cool is that?  T...

There are basically two reasons for viewing a remote desktop: attending online meetings and running applications on (and/or administering) a remote machine. There's a little crossover since some meeting-type software will allow remote control of the presenting machine. As part of my daily grind, I frequently either host or attend online meetings, and assist end users. My employer, Sisyphean Corp, uses Webex for external meetings (with vendors, consultants or other folks not on our network, and - of late - Microsoft Lynx for internal meetings. There's always Windows Remote Desktop, but it's not well-suited to connecting to machines behind firewalls across the internet, and while it's fine at controlling, it's not designed for presentations. So, what do you do if you are not part of a huge, monolithic corporation? I was curious and found the following free alternatives in no particular order (you can thank me later).  Webex - I was slightly surprised to discov...

It's heresy, I  know. I've used Windows for a while, usually grudgingly, and I'll admit: I've been a hater. I won't bore you with a laundry list of  objections I've had over the years.  "The triumph of marketing over technology," sums up my feelings. After sticking with Windows XP's bubble gum look and feel (it puts a whole new spin on "gooey interface") I finally made the jump to Windows 7, after skipping the over-hyped and under-performing Vista, and thought it was....not bad. Being an IT geek I of course had to try out the new Windows 8 prereleases, featuring the new Metro Interface. I thought: this sucks. But a funny thing happened. I picked up a copy of Windows 8 on the cheap (for a while you could snag a legit copy from Microsoft for $15 if you knew how to game the system) and installed it on a new Zotac ZBOX microcomputer that doubles as a video server. There are several add-ons one can install that bring back the St...

"Cloud computing" has been getting a lot of buzz the last couple of years. Quite a few companies have jumped in and started offering various cloud-based services to consumers. These have included applications ( Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365) , collaboration ( Zoho ), storage/file-sharing ( Dropbox , Box and SugarSync ), music streaming ( Amazon Cloud Player and Google Play ), and video streaming (NetFlix and Blockbuster). On paper, these are great products. You can access your documents, photos, or music from anywhere, you can share stuff between devices and other people -- anywhere where you have a internet connection. Use your computer, use your smartphone: it's all the same. There's just one sticking point: your internet provider. The problem:  bandwidth capping. Once upon a time, we were told that broadband was the future - we'd all be connected, all the time. That was back in the day when your internet service provider sold you unlimited us...

I downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview today and just spent the last several hours playing around with it. It's ....interesting. Now, granted, Microsoft has taken pains to emphasize this is a Beta release (they have a cute lil' "Beta" fish on the start up screen to remind us), and also is careful to point out much could change between now and whenever they end up releasing this thing.  And having messed about with it, I'd bet money they will, since its current iteration will not win it many fans. It's ....interesting. And "interesting" is not the same as good. If you don't believe me, next time your significant other makes dinner and asks how you like it, say, "It's ....interesting." You'll find it scores you no points. For whatever reason, Microsoft has decided to drag out it's clunky, horsey-looking Windows Mobile interface (now apparently re-name "Metro") and attempt yet again to sell it to the ...

Dennis Ritchie passed away on October 8, at age 70. Most people will say "huh," upon hearing his name. I'd argue he had a much greater influence on modern computing than the late Steve Jobs. He developed C , the most widely used programming language in the world, while working at Bell Laboratories in the late 60's. He still has a home page at Bell Labs . While originally written to be used to create the Unix operating system (which Ritchie also developed, along with Ken Thompson), C is now used for writing software for computers, embedded devices, smart appliances, cellphones, consumer goods - everything from operating systems to applications to device drivers to...well, you name it. The beauty of C is that it can be compiled for any number of different platforms. C gave rise to an number of variations and spin offs - C+, C++ (I'm not making this up) as well as directly and indirectly influencing the structure and syntax of a host of other modern programm...

Since I worked from home yesterday I ended up deciding it would be a good idea to upgrade my iDevices to iOS 5 the very first day it was available . Remind me to never do that again. Not surprisingly, everybody on this side of the space-time continuum made the same foolish choice. My first attempt to download the upgrade started by helpfully informing me it would take around 23 minute to download...then 29...then 38...  Which was bad enough except when it finished, iTunes gave me a terse little error message that said, "there was a problem downloading" blah, blah. Son of a bitch ! After several failed attempts (each longer than the last) I Googled the error message and speculated my anti-virus software was not playing nice with iTunes. Thank you Kaspersky. After disabling it I started the download process again, (it took about 90 minutes) and finally got my iPad updated. The whole process, with backing up, restoring, etc, took roughly 2 and a half to 3 hours. Note ...

I've been writing HTML for about 17 years now, hard as that is to believe. I'm not a fan of WYSIWYG editors - I prefer to use text-based editors. It's how I learned, and as far as I'm concerned, usually easier. After graduating from Notepad, the first editor I bought was something called WebEdit Pro, by Luckman. It had a clean, well-organized interface and I used it for several years before I discovered HomeSite. HomeSite , originally developed by Nick Bradbury (who later went on to create TopStyle, still my favorite CSS editor) was acquired by Allaire, who sold it as a standalone editor, and as a repackaged editor for their flagship ColdFusion software. Incidently, the original freeware version, Homesite 1.2 (written for Windows 95), is still out there on the web, though it's gotten harder to find. Its feature set is pretty basic, but it's still usable, and still has fans. Google it if you're curious. I used various versions of HomeSite for a perio...

Not to yet again brand myself as an ancient, but when I got my first computer (a Tandy Color Computer) the connected world was a much simpler place. I had a 300 baud modem and a CompuServe account which cost me an arm and a leg. This was around 1981. I soon discovered BBS's and saved a bunch of money. This thing called the internet ran on leased 56K phone lines and one had to be at a research or defense facility or employed by the government or military to gain access to it. The "world wide web" wouldn't appear for another 10 years. If you knew someone, you might have access to something a bit more connected than just a BBS. Around the time my oldest was born I had a sibling who worked at a local university and he gave me the dial in number for the library computer. With a little judicious poking around all sorts of interesting things could be found. Telehack.com has put together a blast from the past - a javascript based emulator for that yesteryear of comput...

Here, in one easy-to-read place, is the timeline for Thursday's Amazon Web Services FAIL in their Northern Virginia data center. In case you are interested my phone started ringing at 3:15 AM, CST, about 20 minutes after the error (still not disclosed) that started this whole sorry mess.

By now, if you keep up with all things geekish, you may have heard about Amazon's big outage yesterday . No - this wasn't their online store: this was their other business --  selling their excess capacity as "cloud computing" services. So-called "cloud computing" (also known as utility computing) is all the rage today, and like a lot of things, it's not an entirely new thing. It works by setting up virtual machines in Amazon's massive datacenter. Usually everything works just dandy. But not yesterday . I got a call from one of my internal customers in the UK at 3:00 AM (my employer, the Sisyphean Corp is a global operation) who, in a panicky voice, informed me his Amazon-hosted site was gone. I spent the next 15 hours working to recover it. Amazon has not yet offered a detailed explanation of exactly what happened. My sources, however, have found the reason for all the trouble:

It's a sad thing to see stuff you remember as cutting edge now relegated to nostalgia. But better there than forgotten altogether. PCMag.com posted an amusing slideshow / feature entitled 12 Forgotten Online Games a couple of days ago. The kicker was these were all pre-internet "What?" you say. "There was online before the internet?" Indeed. Dial up services and games abounded, not to mention the grandfather of all community access, the BBS. I had, at various times, an AOL account (using the pre-Windows client), Delphi and CompuServe. And tons of BBS accounts. I was never a huge gamer but I recalled several of the games mentioned in the PCMag story, primarily the BBS "door" games; I had an ongoing friendly rivalry with the SYSOP of the Cat's Eye BBS on his Tradewar 2000 game. I also wasted time on LORD (Lord of Red Dragon) and Planets. My eldest son had a demo account (several, really) on The Realm, which he and one of his friends used t...

Oracle is a relentless devourer of technology companies -- especially competitors. One of their more recent victims has been Sun, the floundering purveyor of Java and the sponsor of OpenOffice.org, a popular open source alternative to Microsoft Office. There is apparently little love lost between Oracle and the OpenOffice.org community. No doubt observing the unhappy fate of the OpenSolaris project, the OpenOffice.org folks have jumped ship , taking the project with them and setting up a new umbrella organization: the Document Foundation , and rechristening their application suite LibreOffice . They did publicly ask Oracle to donate the "OpenOffice" name to the fledgling group, but I suspect no one is holding their breath waiting for that to happen. Much is made in some circles about how "evil" Microsoft supposedly is. Compared to Oracle, they're a bunch of freaking panty-waists. Founder Larry Ellison makes no bones about being a bad-ass. To steal a line,...

I'd sort of been wanting a netbook for a while. These dinky little toys will leave some disappointed who are looking for a cheap general purpose laptop. Understanding the design focus is on portability and battery life is key. After shopping around, I finally took the plunge and got an Acer Aspire. It had a new-ish processor (the Atom N450), a 6-cell battery, 1 GB RAM (expandable to 2 GB by swapping the chip) and a 160 GB hard drive. As with many netbooks, it came equipped with Windows 7 Starter Edition , a stripped down version for the modestly powered machines. 1 GB occasionally leaves it gasping for air. I'd made up my mind to dual boot to Linux before I'd even decided on a machine. Enter Wubi . Wubi (Windows UBuntu Installer) lets you install Ubuntu Linux using a Windows-based installer. No repartitioning, no finding an external CD/DVD drive, no blowing away Windows. Download the installer in Windows, run it, choose the edition you want to install and sit back...

The youngest son had malfunctioning Free Agent external hard drive that had been acting flaky (I will never buy another Seagate drive). Did he pull it without "safely ejecting?" Hell, I don't know. All I do know is the problems started when he started using it with his Windows Vista laptop. Finally it got to the point where his machine and my Windows XP box refused to acknowledge it. Plugging it in would, 3 out of 4 times, cause my machine to freeze.  It had, in fact, become useless. So I offered to try and fix it, and recover the files if possible. The worst that  could happen would be the drive would be unusable. Like it already was. I plugged it into my Linux box (Kubuntu 9.04) and fired up gparted .  Using this I was able to identify the correct device -- /dev/sdb1. Inserting it automatically created a mount point in /media, although it did not automount it. I mounted the drive on /media/FreeAgent using the command: sudo mount -t /dev/sdb1 /media/FreeAgent N...

Latest rumor in the continuing soap opera that is Flash vs. the iPhone: ITWORLD has an article that says there are reports that Adobe is planning to sue Apple in a couple of weeks for Flash non-support. The problem is apparently with the new Apple SDK ("software development kit" for you non-geeks) license, which locks Flash out of the iPhone (and iPad!) even tighter that it previously was. I can picture some Suit at Adobe sputtering, "But they have to have Flash! Everybody uses Flash!" Having a version of a site with Flash and one without is going to be a pain in the ass for the average web developer. Guess which one they'll go with if they want to woo the iPhone/iPad user? Although I use (and like) products from each company I have no great love for either Apple or Adobe -- from a corporate point of view they are both arrogant pricks as far as I can tell. So I'm going to enjoy this pissing contest immensely. Word to Adobe: few if any technology battl...

It's funny how we can be responsible for something much large than ourselves. Case in point: the late H. Edward Roberts . He's well-known in a somewhat narrow context and yet I'd be willing to bet the next 10 people you see have no idea who he is. That being said, he's directly had an impact on you if you are reading this. Ed Roberts developed and sold what was arguably the first commercially successful personal computer, the Altair 8800 , way back in 1975. Just as significantly, he hired a couple of bright, ambitious college dropouts to write a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800: Bill Gates and Paul Allen . Gates and Allen went on found a little software startup called Microsoft. Perhaps you've heard of it? Roberts came out of the hobbyist electronics world. MITS, the company he started, initially designed and sold telemetry devices for model rocketeers, the moved to selling kits for programmable calculators (back when these were enormously expensive). The Janu...

I'm not sitting here (like some colleagues) eagerly awaiting the arrival of an iPad. I have an iPhone which I like a lot, but I don't see the iPad as being that much of an improvement. It's an interesting device but, as is typical for Apple, is overpriced and over designed. Still, I'm hoping it's wildly successful for one reason, and one reason alone: it has no Flash support. Confused? Let me explain. Full confession: I hate Flash. Or rather I hate how it's used by lazy designers to build non-compliant non-accessible websites which are only visible to a subset of the web population. Don't get me wrong: Flash is a tool, and like all tools, there are somethings it is very well suited for. But mostly it is used by ad agencies and design firms to add sizzle and sex appeal to their presentations to clients so they can sell services. Its use contributes to what I once heard referred to as "bandwidth drunkenness." So, the iPad won't support this bli...

Slashdot reminds us that this week would have been the 15th birthday of Microsoft Bob . For a look back, see the Bob Chronicles on Technologizer.com -- worth a visit! Enjoy!

Slashdot had a link this morning to an article entitled " The Secret Origin of Windows ," written by Tandy Trower, who was the Microsoft Product Manager responsible for Windows 1.0. A fascinating, if not geeky read. Thanks, Slashdot ! Enjoy! Update : after posting the above, I remembered The GUI Gallery - which has a vast collection of screenshots of operating systems you've never heard of.